A new US report puts India on a religious-freedom watch list for the seventh year in a row. The findings are getting harder to ignore.
In May, Indian officials put forty people on a boat. They took them into international waters near Burma, gave them life jackets, and told them to swim to shore. Fifteen of the forty were Christian. All of them were Rohingya refugees who had been living in India that same morning. There was no court hearing. No paper on a wall. Just open water, and a government that had decided this was no longer its problem.
This is just one story in a much longer report. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom, known as USCIRF, released its 2026 Annual Report. USCIRF is an independent group set up by the US Congress; it does not answer to one political party. Its chapter on India is blunt. Religious freedom in India “continued to deteriorate” through 2025, the report says. The government wrote new laws that targeted minority groups. It looked away while mobs used force to enforce older ones. And it took direct control of mosques, madrasas, and Waqf land.
This is the seventh year in a row that USCIRF has given India this same warning label: “Country of Particular Concern.” It’s the same label used for North Korea, Afghanistan, and Eritrea. Seven years of warnings, and the US State Department still has not acted on any of them. This year, USCIRF did something new: it named names. It asked Washington to consider freezing assets and banning travel for India’s foreign spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), and for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the group behind the ideas of the ruling party, the BJP.
The details in the report show a clear pattern: limits on what people can believe, and what they can say. In Uttarakhand, a person can now go to prison for fourteen years for an “illegal conversion.” The state also made it a crime to talk about religion online. In Rajasthan, the punishment can now be life in prison. It also requires two months’ notice before a person can legally change their own religion. Assam is writing a new law against so-called “love jihad.” These laws did not stay on paper. In Maharashtra, a Hindu nationalist group called the Vishwa Hindu Parishad demanded the removal of a 300-year-old Mughal emperor’s tomb. This set off riots that injured dozens of people, fed by rumors, spread by BJP officials, that Qur’ans had been desecrated. In Odisha, a mob attacked twenty Christian families who refused to convert to Hinduism. Eight people ended up in the hospital. Police did not step in, then or later.
The government acted the same way as the mobs, not against them. Parliament passed the Waqf Bill, which puts non-Muslims on the boards that manage Muslim religious property: mosques, religious schools, graveyards. Uttarakhand shut down its Madrasa Board and put minority education directly under government control. In Assam, Bengali-speaking Muslims, Indian citizens, with the papers to prove it, were rounded up and pushed across the border into Bangladesh. Officials called them “infiltrators.” Speaking out also became risky. A university professor was arrested over a social media post about Kashmir. In one case alone, in Kashipur, 401 people were named for putting up “I Love Muhammad” posters. And Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam are still in jail, five years later, still waiting for a trial that has never started.
This is not just USCIRF’s opinion. Freedom House released its own 2026 report and gave India a lower score than last year, 62 out of 100. India stayed at “Partly Free.” The US Holocaust Memorial Museum runs a project that tries to warn the world before mass violence happens. It ranked India fourth out of 168 countries for the risk of large-scale killing in the next two years. India was first on that list among countries not already living through mass violence. Three different organizations, three different methods, and they all point the same way.
India’s government has a response, and it is worth hearing, because it is the same response every year. The Ministry of External Affairs called the report a “motivated and biased characterisation.” It said the commission relies on bad sources, not facts. It also said USCIRF should look at attacks on Hindu temples in the United States instead. That last point might even be fair, about a different country’s problem. It does not answer for the forty people who were handed life jackets and told to swim toward Burma.
Read more:https://digdebate.com/world-humanitarian-day-aid-workers-under-fire/
